Whether your app is supplemental to a brick-and-mortar experience or stands alone, engaging with your customers in the present moment is advantageous for your business in more ways than one. But, increasing that performance indicator can prove difficult. If you're looking for new ways to create a stronger relationship with your app users, consider including one or more of the strategies below.

How to Engage App Users in Real-Time

The instant nature of online communication can be challenging for brands to nail with customers. But thanks to the high accessibility of new technologies, apps can engage with users in a way that feels natural over live chat, video, or through custom messages.

Here are five ways brands can leverage in-app features to engage with customers:

1. Win Back Inactive Users With Re-Engagement Campaigns

Some customers will already be more engaged than others. To ensure you are making the most of your active user count, use win-back tactics on inactive users. Here are a few ways you can use re-engagement campaigns to encourage users to come back to your app:

• Push Notifications: Sending alerts straight to your user's home or locked screen will drive them back to your app. Consider pushing them out before someone from your team goes live on your platform to capture their interest in real-time.

• Special Offers: Offering limited-time specials can nudge users to take a second look at your app. Use their interest as an opportunity to schedule a 1:1 meeting with someone from your team to increase their overall interaction with your app.

• Collect Their Feedback: Asking inactive users to fill out a survey won't result in a high completion rate, but asking them to share their feedback live on an in-app video call or chat with a support agent will.

2. Integrate Live Chat

When customers can't connect with a support agent quickly, they might get frustrated and download a competitor's app instead. Offering live chat can circumvent this situation, and it can also be leveraged to increase engagement during in-app live streams, events, and more. Over 69% of consumers demand live chat as a feature, and your app should, too---with conversion rates for live chat increasing by 3.84%. App engagement can also happen between users, strengthening your brand's sense of in-app community.

3. Offer Live Stream Video

Building a video chat app or working a video API into your existing interface creates a faster sales cycle, promotes product education, is a powerful brand humanization tool, and has the potential to reach a broader audience than apps without live streaming. By offering customer support via video, premium content live streams, and interactive live Q&A sessions, your app can increase engagement, repeat visits, and retention.

4. Strengthen Your In-App Community

Offering user-to-user live audio, video, and chat allows them to increase app engagement with one another. They can use these features to give candid reviews of your app's product or service, connect over their love of your app and its content, and create a more dynamic and social experience for themselves. A strong social community will allow your app to understand what users want and how to retain their loyalty.

5. Reward Active Users With Gamification

Gamification features are shown to increase engagement and user satisfaction levels of your app. When users have the opportunity to earn rewards and points within your app, they are incentivized to keep coming back for more. Your app can even design a unique model to ensure that those points can be redeemed for rewards encouraging even more app engagement, like 1:1 sessions with your team or access to exclusive live content.

Benefits of Real-Time Customer Engagement

Here are the top five benefits of integrating a real-time customer engagement strategy into your brand's app:

1. Increased Marketing Efficiency: Frequent communication with customers builds trust in your app and brand and increases their lifetime value and the ROI and impact of your marketing efforts.

2. Higher Conversion Rate: When your sales and support teams are available to app users when they need them the most, they are less likely to churn, abandon their purchases, or disengage.

3. Greater Brand Awareness: More engagement allows your app to establish a good rapport with its users and humanize your brand through candid communication.

4. More Satisfied Customers: Connecting users with support agents when they need them most will increase your app's customer satisfaction ratings and trust.

5. Competitive Edge: Real-time communication allows your app to differentiate itself from competitors who have not yet incorporated the engagement strategies above.

Industries & Use Cases That Leverage In-App Engagement

The benefits of engaging app users can extend to nearly every industry and cover multiple use cases. Let's explore some of the most common ones below:

• Telehealth: Virtual medical appointments have risen in popularity over the past few years. Live chat and video can bridge the gap between patient and provider, resulting in a more satisfactory experience. These telemedicine apps can engage users by leveraging push notifications to encourage patients to save time by completing paperwork before their appointment to keep the provider's schedule on track.

• Dating: While dating apps are commonplace in today's digital world, some users prefer to vet their potential partners before meeting face to face. Enabling them via live chat or video creates a safer and more comfortable in-app experience.

• Marketplace: eCommerce sites and virtual marketplaces can prevent shoppers from abandoning their carts by offering live messaging and video chat to customers and allowing them to ask any purchase-preventing questions. They can also connect them with support agents to resolve shipping issues or complete return requests with a personal touch.

• Shipping & Logistics: With real-time notifications, carriers can keep customers and other drivers updated on shipping timelines and delays. They can also drive users back to the app by enabling push notifications that alert customers of any changes to the delivery.

• EdTech: Providing students with a more engaging and social learning environment will encourage them to make the most out of their courses and reach out to classmates and instructors for help.

• Teams: Businesses can keep remote employees connected and engaged by leveraging the tactics above, like live chat and live streaming. These features will help boost morale and maintain a company culture of open communication.

• Events: Both live and virtual events can incorporate the strategies above to increase engagement, promote attendance, and deliver a more dynamic live experience. They can gamify sessions by incorporating quizzes at the end of them, send out surveys, and use push notifications to alert attendees when sessions are starting.

• Gaming: Gaming apps can keep players coming back for more by strategically promoting in-app engagement with live video, in-game chat, user rewards, and special promotions for highly engaged gamers.

Engaged Users Equal App Evangelists

Engaging your app's users and brand's customers in real-time strengthens your trust, builds greater brand awareness, and increases critical performance metrics like retention, engagement, and lifetime value.

When users spend in your app, they become loyal evangelists who will support new user acquisition efforts, reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC), and improve the efficiency of your marketing campaign by advertising for you through word of mouth.

Integrating a chat API, live video, re-engagement campaign, or gamification model, your brand's app should enjoy customer engagement strategies' short-term and long-term benefits.